What The ?

[XPmonkey]

okay.....since i've installe dmy video card one of my Hard Drives has been powering down and powering up periodically.

sometimes i can hear it whine down then up slowly and other times i can hear just a thunk then it whines up again.

i dunno how to find out or what may be causing this.

sometimes it hangs my computer and it's rebooted twice.

help?

 

[Pancake]

Need to know the card make and details and the motherboard make. Are you running enough power.What is you psu wattage.

 

[pyritechips]

I think pancake is on the right track. You need to tell us the PSU rating. Bigger and more hardware demands higher Wattage. Your symptoms are classic signs: hanging and shutting down and a HDD winding down.

To roughly calculate how big of a PSU you need, try this online calculator:

http://www.jscustompcs.com/power_supply/

 

[XPmonkey]

okay how do i find out my PSU wattage??

I am running an ECS Elitegroup P4 Mainboard P4VMM2
Forsa GeForce FX5200 video card
Windows XP
One 30 Gig Hard drive (primary)
One 40 Gig Hard Drive (Slave)
One 3.5 floppy
One 24x10x40 cdrw

 

[kiwiguy]

okay how do i find out my PSU wattage??

It should be on the label stuck to the PSU viewable from inside the computer case.

 

[Pancake]

You will also find that the Forsa GeForce FX5200 is a 8x AGP card and your board (check in the hand book) is only a 4x AGP slot. This is the problem and you will have to change it for a X4. A lot of people make this mistake when buying a card.
Please let me know the outcome.

 

[XPmonkey]

well al lthe bords (so i was told) are backwrds compatable so i went along with it. i guess they were wrong. I'm going to try to uninstall the board and plug back in my slave drive see if the problem stops. it has since i unplugged my second hard drive and as i write this that leaves me to believ that the card IS in fact bckwards compatible.


hmm.

and my PSU wattage is 400 Watts max

 

[Pancake]

The power looks ok.There maybe a setting in your bios that allows you to run it at 4X.Some AGP slots run at different voltages so check that out against the video card

 

[Elvandil]

GeForce FX5200

Systems Requirement :
Pentium® 3, Pentium® 4, AMD® Athlon® or compatible CPU
64MB system memory
AGP 2X or AGP 2X/4X/8X universal slot with AGP Bus 2.0 compliant
Installation software requires CD-ROM drive
DVD playback requires DVD drive
Operating systems support :

Windows® 98 SE/ Me/ 2000/ XP
Windows® NT (All), Linux Compatible

 

[XPmonkey]

yah evrything seems to work fine once i disconnected my E: drive (that's the one that was powering up & down) Now when i plug in my E: drive i can't even boot up the coputer. I get the Windows XP Splash screen and then it just goes black when it should be going to the Logon screen.

maybe my 40 gig is fubar........god i hope not.

 

[Pancake]

If you uninstall the card and run the onboard video,how does it go then with E drive is connected.?

 

[pyritechips]

XPmonkey:

I had the exact thing happening with an IBM HDD I had as a slave. It kept winding down and it got so bad it stopped the computer from booting. The I started getting scrambled drive name and model in the IDE detect. I suspected an impending failure and removed it.

If you can boot with the drive, get whatever files you want off of it ASAP! Also, if you can, run a HDD diagnostics on it.

 

[XPmonkey]

okay well i went through my Bios and redetected all my drives and still it went to the black screen after the XP Home splash....but this time i let it sit to see if it would do anything and bout 5 minutes later CHDSK started saying that one of my disks needed to be checked for consistencey. It gave me a bunch of bad sectors that were unreadable and deleted some files (just music) and recovered some lost sectors. Now it boots fine with both drives and no more powering up & down.

I'm going to try to reinstall my Video card tomorrow as well as run my defragment utility.

hanks for all your help and i'll let you know how it goes.
I have to be at work in 5 hours so i should get some sleep.

(Oh & FYI Pancake it wouldn''t run with the E: drive connected and on board video)

 

[crjdriver]

Download and run the hd mgf’s utility for checking the drive. It may still be under warranty and you will need the diagnostic info for the RMA.

As to your ps [while it does not seem to be the cause of the problem] just because it is 400W does not mean it is a quality unit. Poor quality ps cause all types of problems. If is says foxxcon, deer, allied, or powmax; do yourself a favor and dump it. Quality units include Antec, Enermax, Enlight, Coolmax. There are others, however those are the ones I use in my builds.

 

[Rollin' Rog]

xpmonkey, we do not appreciate the use of obscenities in posts, or even the asterisks that subsitute for the, please do not post such in the future. I have edited the title accordingly.